The ten matches that decided the Grand Slam field
The structure of this event is brutally simple once it narrows. Ninety-one entrants play down to twenty, those twenty are paired off, and the ten winners are in a televised major while the ten losers go home with nothing. There is no seeding advantage at that point and no second chance, because the Tour Card Holder Qualifier exists specifically to mop up whatever the other routes have left behind.
| Qualified | Score | Missed out |
|---|---|---|
| Stephen Bunting | 5-2 | Jimmy van Schie |
| Joe Cullen | 5-3 | Michael Smith |
| Niko Springer | 5-1 | Stefaan Henderyck |
| Bradley Brooks | 5-2 | Dave Chisnall |
| Ricky Evans | 5-3 | Cristo Reyes |
| Alan Soutar | 5-3 | Mike De Decker |
| Maik Kuivenhoven | 5-2 | Chris Landman |
| Tom Sykes | 5-3 | Adam Leek |
| Carl Sneyd | 5-2 | Andy Boulton |
| Rusty-Jake Rodriguez | 5-2 | Tom Bissell |
Read down the score column and something slightly odd emerges. Ten matches, each one a major place against nothing, and not a single one of them reached a deciding leg. Four finished 5-3, five finished 5-2, and Springer’s was over at 5-1. For an event that is usually remembered for last-leg heartbreak, Friday was a day of players either holding their nerve comfortably or not at all.
Matches were first to five legs, so a full bar would be a deciding leg. None of the ten got there. Source: PDC, Sky Sports, Darts World, dartn.de
Michael Smith led 3-0 and still missed Wolverhampton
Smith won this tournament in 2022, beating Nathan Aspinall 16-5 in the final for the first major title of his career. Four years on he needed one win in a sports hall to get back into it, went 3-0 up on Cullen, and lost five of the next six legs.
Cullen’s recovery was the better story on the day and the more surprising one for anybody who has watched his year. He is a former Masters champion who has spent 2026 well outside the places that qualify a player automatically, and he found the one comeback he needed at the one moment it paid.
For Smith the defeat lands on a week that has already been unkind. The Players Championship Finals draw confirmed on Thursday night has him seeded 56th of 64 at Minehead, because that event ranks players on one season of floor money alone. A former world champion and former Grand Slam champion now has one seeding in the fifties and one tournament he cannot attend.
Who missed out at the Tour Card Holder Qualifier
The entry list for this event is defined by exclusion — only Tour Card holders who have failed to qualify by every other route may enter — so a strong field is itself a sign of a difficult season for a lot of good players. Several of them did not survive their opening match.
| Player | How their day ended |
|---|---|
| Michael Smith | Lost the decisive match 3-5 to Joe Cullen |
| Dave Chisnall | Lost the decisive match 2-5 to Bradley Brooks |
| Mike De Decker | Lost the decisive match 3-5 to Alan Soutar |
| Cristo Reyes | Lost the decisive match 3-5 to Ricky Evans |
| Raymond van Barneveld | Beaten before the decisive round |
| Peter Wright | Lost his first match |
| Danny Noppert | Lost his first match |
| Damon Heta | Lost his first match, to Rusty-Jake Rodriguez |
| Dirk van Duijvenbode | Lost his first match |
| Daryl Gurney | Lost his first match |
Peter Wright is the hardest name on that list to place. He has won the World Championship twice and has reached three Grand Slam finals, and his 2026 now contains neither Wolverhampton nor Minehead. Danny Noppert, Damon Heta and Dirk van Duijvenbode were all gone inside an hour of their first throw, Heta to Rodriguez, who then went through unbeaten.
The Jimmy van Schie footnote
One sequence across the two days in Leicester is worth untangling, because it shows how fine these margins are. On Thursday, Raymond van Barneveld beat his compatriot Jimmy van Schie in his opening match at Players Championship 34, and that single win was enough to confirm his place at the World Championship at Alexandra Palace in December.
On Friday the two men swapped fortunes. Van Schie won through to the last 20 and came within one match of the Grand Slam, losing 5-2 to the top seed Bunting. Van Barneveld, a former Grand Slam champion himself, was beaten before that round and will not be in Wolverhampton. The man who lost on Thursday got closer on Friday than the man who beat him.
Thursday’s other result mattered here too. Tommy Morris beat Luke Humphries 8-5 to win Players Championship 34 without holding a Tour Card at all, and that title took him straight to the Grand Slam. The ninety-one men who turned up on Friday were therefore chasing places in a field that a player ineligible to enter their qualifier had already joined.
Bunting, Springer and the scoring on the day
Bunting was the highest-ranked player in the building and he played like it, winning three matches at better than a hundred against Arno Merk, Callan Rydz and van Schie. Springer produced the best single performance of the last-20 round, a 112.25 average in his 5-1 win over Stefaan Henderyck, and Brooks was not far behind with 106.31 to see off Dave Chisnall 5-2.
Evans took the longest route, beating Thomas Lovely, William O’Connor and then Cristo Reyes, and Soutar came through Madars Razma, Mickey Mansell and Mike De Decker. The PDC lists Kuivenhoven, Sykes and Sneyd as Grand Slam debutants, which is the point of this route: three players with no televised major on their record now have one, and a guaranteed cheque with it.
Evans has the most to play for. His ProTour season ended on Thursday without a World Championship place, so the Grand Slam is now both his reward for Friday and his best remaining chance to climb far enough up the Order of Merit to reach Alexandra Palace by another door.
What happens next
With the field at 48 the tournament can finally be drawn, and the PDC has said the 16 groups will be made on Monday 9 November, with the top 16 by Order of Merit seeded one per group. The Grand Slam itself runs from 14 to 22 November at WV Active Aldersley in Wolverhampton, the first staging of the expanded 48-player format, with a £1,000,000 prize fund and the Eric Bristow Trophy for the winner.
Friday settled the question our preview of the qualifier could not answer: the criteria promised a baseline of eight places, the overflow rule kept adding to it through the autumn, and the number the Tour Card holders were actually playing for turned out to be ten. The rest of the run-in, through Minehead and on to Alexandra Palace, is on the 2026 calendar.